These prosaic details don’t concern us much, if at all, as we walk along Washington Street this unseasonably balmy night in late January. Instead we’re immersed in our hunt for a reasonably quiet place where I can set up my hand-held pocket tape recorder without attracting too much attention, or at least be as inconspicuous as is possible when meeting in public to conduct an interview. After scrapping plans to hole up in a swank bar we commit to a deserted Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. This last minute switch is SaFranko’s idea and makes perfect sense, especially when considering the fine spartan and workmanlike prose that dominates ‘Olivia’.

We settle in over coffee and vanilla cream donuts and begin.

Mark SaFranko:How did you hook up with Dan [Fante] by the way?

Mike Ferraro: Oh, it’s funny, do you know Ben Pleasants?

MS: I don’t know him personally…I know Dan…

MF: Well, I read Ben’s book on Bukowski [VISCERAL BUKOWSKI - Sun Dog Press, 2004]. I found it at the Strand or something in New York. And I had read Ben’s interviews with Dan online, I guess on the Hollywood Investigator. And his email was actually right on there. And Ben is from the East Coast originally…

MS: Um-hmmm, right, right.

MF:And then he went out to L.A.…we had similar jobs…I used to work in a university library too. And his book, if you remember, starts when he first moves to L.A. in the Sixties and he works in the UCLA library…

MS: Uh-huh

MF: So there were some similarities…just personal…so I sent him an email ‘cause I wrote my honors thesis at Rutgers on John Fante, on the early novels.

MS: Uh-huh.

MF: And Ben being, you know, he’s not really mentioned much in [Stephen] Cooper’s book [FULL OF LIFE: A BIOGRAPHY ON JOHN FANTE] but I recognized his name and I read his articles and I just sent him an email telling him who I was.

MS:Right, right.

MF: And he happened to be coming back here for an aunt’s birthday party in April [2005], so we actually met right in Hoboken. We had lunch right on Washington St.

MS: Oh no kidding? So this is becoming the spot. That’s funny.

MF: Yeah, so through Ben I then emailed Dan.

MS: I see…Dan’s an incredibly generous guy. We’re good friends. We’ve known each actually now for, it’s hard to believe, gosh, it’s going on like, almost, nine, ten years. It’s been a long time actually. Yeah it’s been quite a while …I introduced him to his wife.

MF: No way.

MS: Yeah, we’ve had a really bizarre, actually kind of karmic relationship. And so many bizarre, weird things have happened between us. Maybe we knew each in a past life.

[Both laugh.]

MS: Like I said, I introduced him to his wife. In fact, the last time I saw him was in California the day his wife gave birth, which was just very odd, you know?

MF: Sure.

MS: That we happened to get together that day. And the book obviously got channeled into the British publishers by him.

MF:How did that happen? How did you start getting into print?

MS: Well you run into so many walls in publishing. Everything, I‘ve done everything by myself. Every single thing I’ve done, I’ve done on my own. I’ll tell you what I do. Well, the best thing I think, and I never had this until the Fante connection, is to have your father or brother be somebody big (laughing), you know, like a well known writer or somebody in publishing. That’s the way this stuff works. Because it’s so celebrity driven. But what I did from a practical standpoint, and this hopefully helps you, I would get the ‘Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market’ every year and just got thru it A-Z because those places are going to take a chance on people that they don’t know. And it starts giving you some track record. Unless you can leapfrog into a bigger thing, which most times is very difficult to do.

MF: Yeah.

MS: I think for 99% of the people out there writing it’s hard to do. But I worked my way up from these little tiny magazines. And the thing is a lot of those magazines are publishing good stuff it’s just that…Great writers start in those places.

MF: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

MS: So then eventually I started getting into bigger places. I just did it that way. I mean I didn’t know what else to do. With this book, what I did was, I knew right away that it would have very little chance of getting published in the U.S. I knew that right away.

MF: Just from the content?

MS: Just from the content. I knew it would have problems…

MF: Or get relegated to outsider lit? That’s my favorite.

MS: Well, but I like that…

MF: Really? See I get pissed off at that though. Especially with the Fante stuff. I’ve always felt that John’s books, maybe less with Dan’s because of content, but his father’s books anyway, I think that there’s no reason why those books aren’t more in the canon and taught more.

MS: That’s true. You’re right about that.

MF: So that’s my whole thing with John Fante. There’s no reason why those books should get lumped in with marginalized, outsider fiction.

MS: You’re absolutely right about that. I totally agree with you. I recently re-read ASK THE DUST and was shocked at how literary of a novel it is. It’s not a gutter book by any means. It’s got literary pretensions actually. And Dan’s book of poetry [A-gin-pissing-raw-meat-dual-carburetor-V8-son-of-a-bitch from Los Angeles, Sun Dog Press, 2002] I really liked; his play, THE CLOSER, was very good, too, by the way. THE CLOSER was excellent.

MF: I haven’t read it; I’ve read the family play [DON GIOVANNI, Burning Shore Press, April 2006].

MS: Nobody talks about him as a playwright. And he’s really a very strong playwright. I think it’s a particularly strong suit for him.

MF: Totally. And that’s what I was hinting at about the whole outsider literary thing. I guess it’s nice that there are places like that for books that get shut out but I just don’t understand why if you talk about certain things, in a certain why, it’s automatically deemed outsider fiction.

MS: (Laughing) I agree with you on that. I don’t either.

MF: I don’t get it. It just irks me. Publishing in general. It seems like the same types of books are being published at the big houses. The same safe, familiar shit, you know? Like David-fucking-Sedaris and shit.

MS:Yeah, yeah.

MF: It seems like you really have to cater your fiction and what you want to do to even have a glimmer of a shot.

MS:Yeah you do.

MF: And the same thing with music. But I would think with publishing, ‘cause I’m so naïve—what do I know?—but I’m learning very quickly that there are very strict guidelines of what seems to be accepted and you know, so I guess that’s it? There really doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it. It is really disheartening.

MS: It is very disheartening. As I said, I knew immediately that OLIVIA would have no chance here, aside for Black Sparrow and that’s overwhelmed by, well that’s gone now, but at the time it was inundated with every so-called outsider. And it was a Bukowski house period, basically, at a certain point. Then there was Sun Dog [Press].

MF:Yes.

MS: And that’s it!

MF:I would think HATING OLIVIA would be a shoe in for either of those houses.

MS:You know what? At the end of the day, it’s so difficult. I’m just happy that it got out in any form, seriously. It basically took nine years from the writing of that book for this thing to get out. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? And it’s a small press too. Nine years. It’s just very hard. It’s depressing in my case because I kinda feel like over the past years I’ve proved myself. I’ve published fifty stories. I’ve gotten citations from Best American Mystery Stories which is a mainstream thing. Nominated for a Pushcart Award. I’ve been in Ellery Queen a couple of times. It’s not like I’m someone coming out of left field that hasn’t done anything. And it’s still brutal. It’s still brutal.

MF:That’s very discouraging.

MS: For me everything has been hard. For me everything has been very, very difficult. I was always coming into the fucking slush pile and there was nothing I could do about it. So I sent this manuscript out. Well actually, what happened was, one day I was in the World Trade Center’s Borders. I don’t know if you remember that store.

MF: I hadn’t been to the Trade Center in years. Years and years and years.

MS: Well it was the best chain bookstore I’ve ever been in. I used to pass through it everyday. ‘Cause I worked in the city and my wife worked in that building.

MF: Sure.

MS: And I figured, since there are no publishers that are going to look at this book here [OLIVIA] I’ve got to get some authors who are alive and see if I can get a blurb from them about it. That’s how I started. So I picked this guy, this Frenchmen, Philippe Djian, who wrote BETTY BLUE.

MF: I don’t know that book.

MS: It became an art house film here. It was the only one of his novels published in English. I got his name and I tried Leonard Michaels who wrote a book called SYLVIA. He’s dead now. Anyway, I wrote these letters to Djian and Michaels and I was walking past the John Fante shelf in the Trade Center bookstore and I saw a book by Dan Fante, who I didn’t know. And I picked it up and I started to read the first page.

MF: Which book was it?

MS: CHUMP CHANGE. And I said ah this looks interesting. So I bought it. And then I wrote him a letter and of the three people, he was the last guy who I thought would answer. Because of the content of the book. Somehow my impression of him was that he was a guy who would be difficult to approach. For one reason or another. I don’t know why. (Laughing) And of course he was the only one that did write back and said, “Send the book out.” And he gave me a great blurb. Which shocked me. He gave me a really nice review, which I thought was very generous of him. And that’s how things got rolling. Dan was really instrumental; he’s really made this book happen.

MF: That’s great that he could help you. Dan’s a really straight shooter.

MS: He’s a really good guy. I’ve never met anyone as generous as him in this business. People would walk over if you dropped dead. In any of the so-called glamour professions, it’s competition. He’s an exception; he’s a very, very good guy. All kinds of stuff has just worked out between myself and him. For god knows what reason. I’m not sure what it is.

MF: Just from that letter you sent?

MS: Yeah, just from the letter. I’ve thought about this often afterwards. You know how you kind of rack your brain for how to make certain things happen in life? And you know you hear these old clichés about how you have to try everything? Well, sometimes when you try something from left field it works. You just don’t know. That’s how that got rolling anyway.

MF: How has it been for you writing through the years? Was there a moment when you felt like you had finally figured things out or was it a more gradual process? Any book in particular point you in the right direction?

MS: My feeling is that, over the years that I’ve been working, what happens is that, it seems that there’s a “Eureka! Moment” but there’s really not. It’s a slow painstaking process. Year by year goes by and you get a little bit better. Unless I guess you have help. But I’ve always worked by myself. I’ve never had any help. With an editor or a mentor. I never took any creative writing classes or anything. And you sit there, and it takes years to get better, for your style to evolve. That’s how it’s been for me. George Simenon, a Belgian/French novelist who wrote like 600 novels, he said one time that writing a novel is a very difficult technique. And I think that’s true. You can actually have the tools to do it but when you put it all together it doesn’t work. The book that really got me started as a writer was Henry Miller ON WRITING. I plucked it off of a bookshelf and started reading and that was it. That was a true eureka moment. That’s when I started to say to myself, you know, maybe I could do this. I never thought I could before that. I come from a blue collar background where nobody has ever done anything creative but maybe. Maybe I could do it. This is what he did.

Mike Ferraro is a writer and rocker living in a New Jersey suburb of New York City. In 2001 he completed an honors thesis at Rutgers University entitled "The Only Freckle-Faced Wop on Earth: Identity, Anger and Shame in the Early Novels of John Fante." Mike is currently at work on a first novel, Due Diligence, and a full length collection of home recordings. He also paints. For more info visit www.mikeferraro.net , or email: info@mikeferraro.net.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.